Ernesto was born and grew up in Rio de Janeiro, where he graduated in physics from Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUC-Rio) in 1996. In 1998 he completed a Master''s degree in quantum optics at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), working with Paulo Américo Maia Neto on the dynamical Casimir effect. He got his PhD in quantum information and foundations of quantum mechanics from the University of Oxford in 2002, with Lucien Hardy as thesis advisor.